The Manifesto Club supported the Free to Disagree campaign against the Scottish Hate Crime Bill – legislation that meant you could be imprisoned for being ‘hateful’ in your own home. Here is a guest post by Stuart Waiton, a Scottish academic who was one of the leading figures in the campaign.
It’s difficult to know what to make of the Hate Crime Act in Scotland. It was launched with such stupidity and so many own goals that by the end of the first day of its existence the first minister Humza Yousaf had received more ‘hate’ complaints than any other individual in the country.
Part of the police launch came with a campaign that stated that young white working-class men were the most likely to commit hate crime – so no prejudice there then, everyone shouted. But, to fit with the times, the police promo was there to help these young men with their emotions of hate: for some, the sentiment was ‘thanks but no thanks’.
Then there was the training for the police. (Bear in mind that the Act was passed three years ago and only came into effect in April this year, such was the concern about how it would be implemented and what it actually meant in practice.) This was a police training session about transphobia, where the hater was called Jo. This looked like a ‘parody of JK Rowling’, whose first name is Jo. Not the smartest of moves by the police.
And then there was the Hate Monster, again part of the police promo campaign, starring a Muppet-like fluffy, angry red puppet that quickly became a figure of fun for all the critics, and ended up as star of the Comedy Unleashed event that took place in Edinburgh on the day of the Act’s launch.
Nobody seemed to be laughing though about the new Act, and the fact that journalists felt threatened by it helped to create an atmosphere of incredulity and farce about the whole thing. And yet here we are, living in a country where you can be imprisoned for being hateful in your own house.
But will it make any difference?
Like many Scottish laws, it feels like it has less to do with practicalities than with ‘changing the culture’. As such, it is difficult to know if there will be more arrests or punishment for individuals.
What the Act does do, however, is to keep up the education within and by institutions, such as the police, about what are correct and incorrect ideas and opinions. Perhaps even worse, it has resulted in the creation of over 400 ‘Hate Hubs’ where you can report hate.
On the list of Hate Hubs are some universities and a significant number of colleges. So the very places where ideas should be openly discussed are now part of the police framework for regulating ‘hate’. Add to this the fact that most of these places now have ‘Tell Us’-type pages that encourage anonymous complaints about lecturers and students, and we have the potential for Stasi-like educational institutions emerging, where anonymous complaints end up creating police files of non-crime hate incidents.
Discussion about this backward authoritarian law has all but stopped. The law exists, as do the Hate Hubs. The police have had their training, but the negative reaction to the Act, one suspects, has encouraged the police and even the politicians to reign in their necks and find something else to do with their time – arrest some criminals, perhaps.
- Dr. Stuart Waiton is senior Lecturer in Sociology and Criminology at Abertay University.